Chapter 3: Vocabulary Keywords

Cognitive Psychology

Attention

The cognitive process of concentrating on specific information while ignoring other stimuli; essential for perception, memory, and problem-solving.

Divided-Attention Task

A task that requires focusing on multiple stimuli or performing more than one task simultaneously; often results in decreased performance due to cognitive limitations.

Multitask

Engaging in two or more tasks at the same time, which typically leads to reduced efficiency and accuracy due to divided attention.

Selective-Attention Task

A task in which individuals are instructed to pay attention to certain stimuli while ignoring others; used to study attentional focus and filtering.

Dichotic Listening

A research method in which two messages are played simultaneously into different ears, and participants must attend to only one; used to study selective attention.

Shadow

The act of repeating aloud one auditory message while ignoring another in dichotic listening experiments.

Cocktail Part Effect

The phenomenon of noticing your name or other significant information in an unattended auditory channel, demonstrating the selective nature of attention.

Working Memory

A system for temporarily holding and manipulating information needed for complex cognitive tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning.

Stroop Effect

A delay in reaction time when the color of a word's font conflicts with the word's meaning (e.g., the word "red" written in blue ink); demonstrates automatic vs. controlled processing.

Automatic Processes

Cognitive tasks that require little or no conscious effort and do not interfere with other tasks (e.g., reading for skilled readers).

Controlled Processes

Cognitive activities that require conscious effort and attention, often slow and effortful, especially when unfamiliar or complex.

Emotional Stroop Task

A variation of the Stroop task where participants name the color of words with emotional significance; slower responses can indicate attentional bias.

Phobic Disorder

An anxiety disorder characterized by intense, irrational fear of specific objects or situations, often revealed through attentional biases in tasks like the emotional Stroop.

Attentional Bias

The tendency to pay more attention to emotionally significant or threatening stimuli, often observed in anxiety or phobia.

Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

A psychological treatment model that focuses on changing both thoughts and behaviors, often used to address attentional biases and anxiety disorders.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

A condition following trauma, marked by intrusive thoughts and heightened vigilance; associated with difficulty regulating attention, especially toward trauma-related stimuli.

Visual Search

A task where participants look for a target item among a field of distractors; used to study attention allocation and visual processing.

Isolated-Feature/Combined Feature Effect

The phenomenon were searching for a single distinct feature (e.g., color) is faster than searching for a combination of features (e.g., color and shape).

Feature-Present/Feature-Absent Effect

Searching for an item with a feature (e.g., a line) is faster and more accurate than searching for one missing a feature; supports asymmetry in visual processing.

Orienting Attention Network

A neural system involved in shifting attention to different locations in space, especially for visual stimuli; typically involves the parietal lobe.

Brain Lesion

Damage to a specific area of the brain, often used in cognitive neuroscience to study the functions of those areas, including attention networks.

Unilateral Spatial Neglect

A condition, often caused by damage to the right parietal lobe, where individuals ignore stimuli on one side of space, usually the left.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan

A neuroimaging technique that uses radioactive tracers to measure blood flow and brain activity during cognitive tasks.

Executive Attention Network

A network in the prefrontal cortex responsible for resolving conflicts among responses, managing tasks requiring planning, inhibition, and decision-making.

Bottleneck Theories

Theories that suggest attention has a limited capacity and that information is filtered early or late in processing, allowing only some input to pass through.

Feature-Integration Theory

A theory by Treisman that proposes attention is required to bind different features (e.g., color, shape) into a unified perception of an object.

Distributed Attention

A mode of attention in which all parts of a scene are processed at once automatically, often used in easy or well-practiced tasks.

Focused Attention

A mode of attention where processing is directed to one part of the visual field or one stimulus at a time, necessary for binding features together.

Illusory Conjunction

An error where features from different objects are incorrectly combined, typically occurring when attention is distracted or limited.

Binding Problem

The question of how separate features (e.g., color, shape, location) are integrated to form a single, coherent perception of an object.

Consciousness

The awareness of internal and external experiences; includes perception, thoughts, emotions, and attention, often studied in relation to cognitive control.

Mindless Reading

Reading without attention or comprehension; eyes move across the page, but the meaning is not processed or retained.

Mind Wandering

The shift of attention from a primary task to unrelated thoughts, often spontaneous and linked to reduced task performance.

Thought Suppression

The conscious effort to avoid certain thoughts, which can paradoxically make those thoughts more persistent.

Ironic Effects of Mental Control

The phenomenon were trying to suppress certain thoughts leads to their increased occurrence, due to divided control resources.

Blindsight

A condition where individuals with damage to the visual cortex can respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness of seeing them.

Mindfulness Meditation

A practice involving focused, non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, shown to improve attention and reduce mind wandering.